Untitled: A Junior Conceptual Project by Drew Garvey (2015)

Beginning this project I was lost. I had never created conceptual art nor art non digitally. Deciding what mediums to use for my art piece was the most challenging aspect because I was free to use almost anything. Since I had to relate my mediums to the feeling of scorn and the event of a long walk, glass immediately came to my mind. Glass served as a symbol for the audience to hold on to and remember my piece. I decided to use objects that represented scorn, such as broken glass and garbage. I then scanned these objects on a scanner. For my fine art I created a background painting for all the objects to be placed on. I used blue, green, and violet watercolors on water paper and mixed all three colors together to create a bright effect. I then took the scanned photo of the garbage and broken glass into Adobe Photoshop. I used the magic wand tool to erase the current photo’s background and replace it with the watercolor painting. After this, I adjusted the brightness, contrast, saturation, and curves.

When I initially thought of scorn it provided a feeling of uselessness. I used glass to represent scorn because glass is almost useless, it is manipulated in many ways and often broken because it is fragile and not important. I also used garbage as a metaphor for scorn because garbage is often treated with no respect and viewed as something irrelevant in our society. For the other half of my concept statement, I associated a long walk with escaping something. When people are frustrated or upset they turn to something to escape that feeling, such as breaking something to release an emotion. I used broken glass as a metaphor for taking a long walk because it demonstrates someone breaking the glass to escape something.